Customer Complaint on Tuning

[Israel Stein]

At 12:42 PM 8/15/2008, William F. Monroe wrote:
>If you did substandard work, refund the money.  If you didn't, 
>don't.  Easy as pie.  You performed a valid service, you should be 
>compensated and should not feel guilty for that.  If you don't value 
>your time, neither will your clients.  When you give a refund, you 
>are validating your (former?) clients complaint that you are not 
>qualified.  You are qualified, you did render top-notch service 
>(above and beyond, I might add with the call-backs).  You really 
>shouldn't allow yourself to be made to feel badly about this one.  I 
>know some battles aren't worth fighting, and you have to make that 
>call.  One thing to keep in mind, however, is that no matter what 
>you do for this one, chances are pretty good she won't say good 
>things about you.  Refusing a refund won't make that part of this 
>situation any worse.
>
>Invite her to call another qualified technician.
>
>William R. Monroe

Many years ago in Boston I was that "other qualified technician" that 
a lady with an old beater called. She was not happy with how the work 
of the previous tuner sounded - a fellow whom I knew to be a 
perfectly competent practitioner. I discussed the problem with her 
and from what she was telling me I got a hunch. So I slightly fuzzed 
up the unisons on a couple octaves and asked her if that was better. 
She was ecstatic - yes, yes!. So I did that to the rest of the piano, 
collected my fee and left a happy client behind. Never heard from her 
again, thank G-d.

Maybe good clean unisons on a crummy piano bring all those acoustical 
anomalies into sharp focus. Fuzzing the unisons may mask them. Or 
maybe I am just making excuses. Who knows. But it worked once and I 
never lost any sleep over it...

Israel Stein




>Wow. This is a first for me. This lady is nuts. I checked the piano 
>out this past Sunday. It had a few unisons singing a bit (IMHO, not 
>uncommon a week after doing a 25-cent pitch raise), but otherwise 
>sounded fine (well, as "fine" as most any 1970 Baldwin console 
>sounds). And I told her so. I checked octaves, thirds, fourths, 
>etc., etc. and it's all in the ballpark.
>
>She plays a tune and stops and says "hear that? it's wrong"! Well, 
>sure, anytime you play an E and an F# together it sounds pretty bad! 
>But she'd play other things and stop and say "that's wrong". Sounded 
>fine to me. I didn't know what to say really. We did talk about the 
>possibility that she had just gotten used to how it sounded when it 
>was way out of tune. She agreed to play it a bit more and see.
>
>So she calls me just now ranting and raving "it's all wrong, it's 
>all wrong".  She says even her students are complaining. What the ........
>
>She tells me that some times one song will sound fine, and then the 
>next one sounds wrong.
>
>Does the piano good. Of course not. It sounds like a crappy little 
>Baldwin console that has sat too many years on the back porch 
>(enclosed) of a home in Florida. But it sounds to be in as good a 
>tune as any little piano like it.
>
>So I guess the next step is to simply tell her that I don't seem to 
>be able to satisfy her piano service needs and that she might be 
>more satisfied with someone else's services. But that leaves one 
>question remaining - in her view I have not tuned her piano - in my 
>view I have. I don't think I should be returning her $95 (yeah, 
>yeah, I didn't charge her for the pitch raise....). But then again, 
>I'm sure she's on some sort of fixed income, and I've really never 
>had an unhappy customer before......
>
>I don't think there is any real good resolution to this situation. 
>Any great ideas? Just tell her to find someone else and leave it at 
>that? Seems like the only thing that makes any sense to me - but I 
>kinda hate taking her money also.....
>
>Terry Farrell

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